Intermittent Fasting – How To and Strategies for Success
If you are interested in trying intermittent fasting but don’t think you’ll be able to do it, or maybe you have tried it before without much success, this post is for you. Please read this post if you want specifics on the what and why of intermittent fasting. This post is going to give you practical tips for making it work.
*Disclaimer: I am not a doctor. I am a nationally board certified functional medicine health coach who has happened to have a lot of health struggles through the years. The Paleo diet, now strictly gluten free, but not always paleo, other functional medicine living principles AND intermittent fasting have all put my autoimmune disease in remission, kept me from developing any additional autoimmune diseases and overall led to a high quality of life and health! So no, I am not an expert on intermittent fasting, but I do know a lot about it, I research a ton and have a pretty great success story to share. Ok, on with the show.
How to: Intermittent Fasting
Step #1: Assess your schedule and lifestyle and decide on an ideal fasting schedule.
Whether you fast all day and eat late afternoon/evening time or eat in the morning and then fast the rest of the day will depend on your work schedule and your family schedule.
Let’s say you are a nurse who works a night shift. You probably want to fast during your work schedule (for sustained energy and efficiency) and eat when you get home.
If you are a busy stay-at-home mom and want fewer distractions and sustained energy throughout your day, it will likely work best for you to fast until late afternoon or dinner time. Thinking back to my own days at home with little ones, it would have been very convenient to focus on the kids, feeding them, caring for them, doing all the household chores, without having to stop and worry about feeding myself. Then the whole family can sit down to a healthy dinner together.
Once you have figured out when you want to fast, it’s time to give it a try.
My own fasting journey was a very gradual one and that is the method that seems to work well for most people – but not everyone. Do you think you would like a gradual entry or are you an all-or-nothing sort of person who wants to dive right in? I tend to be the latter, but when it comes to intermittent fasting, the gradual approach works well for most people. Let’s face it, not eating is something your body and mind need time to get used to. Three meals a day with snacks in between is so ingrained in most of us that the thought of skipping even one of those eating opportunities is just too bizarre for words. You’re going to have to wrap your mind around this idea and then get your body to follow. Believe me when I say that if you have any body fat (most people have way too much) you can fast. Period. It’s that simple. If you are someone in the overweight or obese category, your body has enough stored fuel that you could go without eating for days, weeks, maybe months weeks and be perfectly healthy. I know that sounds radical, but it’s true. I’m not suggesting you do such a thing, I’m just trying to get you to understand that the stored fat on your body is fuel and your body knows how to use it and will use it if given the opportunity. I’m also not suggesting that you are interested in fasting for weight loss only. There are many health benefits to fasting. My point is simply that if you have body fat, you can fast.
Tip #1: Start slow
I’m going to use a standard schedule of fasting all day until afternoon or dinner time as our example. If you work a night shift and will be fasting/eating on a different schedule, simply use the basic fasting/eating times as a reference and apply to your needs.
If you normally get up and immediately have a cup of coffee with cream and sugar (or anything in your cup besides just coffee), switch to black, unflavored coffee. Believe me when I say that this alone can be a huge step for many people. Continue with this one step for as long as you feel you need.
At this point you have fasted since bedtime, had only black coffee upon waking rather than coffee with some sort of additives, which equals a meal to your body. Whenever you’re ready for breakfast, go for it. This is a great way to start intermittent fasting.
Remember, in order to truly be fasting (ie. clean fasting), you cannot consume anything with a flavor that your body recognizes as food, nor can you consume any protein, which means collagen powders are out.
Step 2: No snacks after dinner
Now that you’ve figured out your fasting schedule, it’s time to really think about how you can step your way to eventually fasting 18-20 hours. The best place to start is by stopping eating and drinking calories as soon as dinner is complete. Yes, your body will be digesting your dinner for a while, so no, technically you are not in a fasted state yet, but to keep things as uncomplicated as possible, your fasting clock begins as soon as you finish your last meal for the day. If you’re going to eat dessert, that’s totally fine, but try not to snack after dinner. If that’s a habit you’re currently in, you are going to need to figure out how to break that habit. We’ll talk habit formation below.
Step 3: Black Coffee
If you are a “loaded” coffee drinker, making the switch to black may be a challenge, but you can do it. Most people I’ve spoken with can adjust their tastebuds in three days. Yep, just three days! If you try your coffee black and really hate the taste of it, find another coffee. There are many good, high quality coffees on the market that taste amazing. It’s like wine – you’ll notice hints of fruit, chocolate, smoke, etc. in a good quality coffee.
It will also be easier to drink your coffee black if you have a lighter roast. My favorite is the Ethiopia blend from Larry’s Beans. It just so happens that this coffee roaster is local to me, but I order my beans from Amazon because the price is better. This is a light roast, organic and shade grown. I find that non-organic, non-shade grown coffees give me heartburn. If you experience the same, try going organic and shade-grown.
Step 4: Don’t eat breakfast
You’ve had your coffee and brushed your teeth. Time to fill up that water bottle and drink water, water and more water. No, you can’t put lemons or limes or any sort of flavoring in your water. I do recommend electrolytes and the only one I recommend while fasting is the Raw Unflavored from LMNT.
Tip #2: If you find yourself thinking about food during this fasting time, you need to be distracted. You are probably busy with your work or just life, but if that is not enough to keep you from thinking constantly about food, then another level of distraction is necessary.
I love to listen to podcasts and when I was first trying intermittent fasting, I listened to fasting podcasts. It was encouraging to hear success stories, it was helpful to get advice from experts and it motivated to keep fasting for just a little bit longer. Basically, I was filling my brain with thoughts of fasting rather than thoughts of eating, being hungry, snacks, etc.
The top fasting podcasts I recommend are:
The Intermittent Fasting Podcast with Cynthia Thurlow and Melanie Avalon (Used to be Gin Stephens with Melanie). This one if my favorite and I highly recommend you go back to the beginning and listen from there. Some things have changed over the years, but the basics are the same and their advice is helpful and encouraging.
Intermittent Fasting Stories – Gin Stephens hosts this one and it’s just a conversation between she and another IFer sharing their stories. Sometimes I like these and sometimes not. It just depends on how much I can relate to the guest, but a lot of people find these very encouraging. The bottom line of a lot of people’s stories is the same: I tried everything else and finally I found IF and it was the magic bullet for me.
Waist Away: The Intermittent Fasting Podcast with Chantel Ray – So many great guests, helpful information, new research and more. This is a really meaty podcast. It may be overwhelming at the beginning so it may be a good one to just search if you have specific questions or topics of interest.
If you can make it through breakfast time without loading down your coffee or snacking, then you’re doing great!
Chances are that your stomach has growled a few times, but you’ve pushed through and now you’re really ready to eat. Let’s say it’s now 10 AM. That means that if you finished dinner at 7 PM, you’ve probably fasted 15 hours by now so that’s a great starting place. Many fasting “experts” agree that fasting 18-20 hours is the sweet spot for health benefits. If you start out only fasting 14-15 hours, that is amazing!
Step 4: Push your fasting window out little by little. That’s really it. Four steps. There are not endless stages to this process. Depending on how severe your symptoms and/or how motivated you are to make fasting work, you can take this step fast or slow.
What worked for me was to simply extend my fast by a half hour to an hour every week or so. This really depended on what I had going on. I wasn’t religious about it or anything. Whenever I felt like I could go a little longer before eating, I would. Sometimes I had to consciously challenge myself to fast longer and sometimes I was just so busy, I didn’t have time to even think about eating.
I distinctly remember meeting a friend for coffee at 1:00 one day when I had previously only been fasting until lunch time. I decided that I would try to make my fast last until the end of our coffee date. I made a little trail mix and stashed that in my car for afterward in case I was starving. Plus, we were at a coffee shop with gluten free options so I knew I could grab some food if I really needed it.
By the time we were done chatting, it was a little after 3:00 when I got in my car. I remember being so proud of myself that I had made it that long and I had so much energy! I snacked on my trail mix as I drove home with a great sense of accomplishment. It was in that moment that I knew this fasting thing was going to work for me, simply from a practical standpoint. I really had no health outcomes to assess at this point other than having plenty of energy to get through my day.
Eventually, I reached the point where I would not eat until around 4:00, which is the time I usually start preparing dinner for my family. I cannot cook without tasting and so when I’m ready to cook, I must be ready to eat. Of course, by 4:00 I’m generally ready to start eating anyway so this works out perfectly. The danger for me though is to not eat so much while I’m cooking that I end up too full to eat the healthy and balanced dinner. Believe me, that has happened more times than I’d care to say.
Tip #3: Black coffee or tea can act as appetite suppressants
Take this tip cautiously, but if your body can tolerate a little extra caffeine, sipping on black coffee or tea mid-morning or early afternoon can really help to curb your appetite. When I was first getting into intermittent fasting, I drank so much water, I felt like I needed to move my office into the bathroom! And I drank a couple extra cups of coffee throughout the day as well. It really did help to keep my appetite at bay and I have now reaped the benefits of fasting. Eventually, my body did adjust to the fasting and I was able to drop the excessive water and coffee consumption.
I feel like I need a long, bullet point list of steps and strategies to make IF easier. The basics of it are so simple – don’t eat or drink anything with flavor or calories until you’re ready to open your eating window. The trick here is to distract yourself or keep yourself busy so you can make it through those adjustment days/weeks/months.
I’m sure you’re wondering how long it will take to adjust and be able to make it through the entire fasting window without effort and unfortunately, I can’t give you an answer because that will vary from person to person. I really can’t remember how long it took me and to be honest, it is something I still think about every day. I try to be very conscious of how hungry I am – how much nourishment my body needs. I reflect on how hard my workouts have been lately, how many weight lifting days I’ve had that week and how intense they were, how much sleep have I been getting, how busy my days have been, etc. Your stomach will growl no matter what. It’s a physiological process and it doesn’t mean you’re hungry. So you have to figure out how to tell when you actually need to eat.
To recap the steps to intermittent fasting:
- Determine your ideal fasting schedule
- No snacking after dinner
- Drink only black coffee or black tea in the morning (of course water is fine too)
- Don’t eat breakfast
- Push your fasting window out little by little
Let’s talk habit formation for a little bit. Let’s all be honest with ourselves here – many times we eat out of desire or boredom and not out of need. We are very much over-fed in most of the western world. We eat out of habit more than out of need a lot of the time. So a discussion of learning a new way of eating (or in this case, not eating), should certainly include a discussion of habit formation and habit breaking.
There are many variations on this theme, but when you talk habit, you talk feedback loop. Some people call this a habit loop, but the components are basically the same:
There is some sort of trigger
which elicits a response or behavior
and then there is an outcome to the behavior
If you are wanting to start or become successful with intermittent fasting, then you need to break some habits (eating after dinner, eating first thing in the morning, putting cream and sugar in your coffee, etc.) and you need to start a new habit (not eating or drinking calories or flavored things during your fasting window).
An example: You are used to munching on a few M&Ms an hour or two after dinner, but now you really want your fasting window to start earlier in the evening so you need to break yourself of that nighttime snack habit.
- What is the trigger that causes you to reach for the M&Ms? Is it sitting down to watch TV? Is it finally getting the kids all in bed? Is it when you get a glass of wine (another habit that needs breaking)? Is it simply when you see the jar of candy? The very next time you find yourself reaching for the candy, ask yourself, “Why am I doing this now? What makes me want to have the candy?” The answer to that question is your trigger.
- The behavior is eating the candy. This one is pretty simple.
- Now you must figure out the outcome or reward for eating the M&Ms. What do you get out of it? Does the chocolate relax you? We aren’t going to get into the science of dopamine and how that sugar affects your brain. Just think practically – how do you feel after eating the candy? What’s so good and rewarding about it that you want to do it so often? That’s the outcome you’re going to be looking for in your new habit.
Now you need a new habit to begin in place of the candy eating habit. Go back to the trigger you figured out earlier. When that same triggering event occurs, you are going to note it, but the behavior will be different.
- Trigger – same as above
- Behavior – what can you do instead of eating the candy? Is the candy part of your wind-down routine each night? Is it just a little treat for a day of hard work? Does this happen when you’re close to bed or is it pretty shortly after dinner? The timing and circumstances will determine what new behavior you want to put in the old behavior’s place. Some suggestions of new behaviors: take a walk, play outside with the kids or dog, play a board game, have family reading time, do something else with your hands while watching TV such as draw, color or sew.
- The outcome may be the same as the outcome from eating the candy (happiness, relaxation, energy, etc.) or it may be something entirely new. If eating the candy made you feel rewarded, what else would elicit that same feeling? What, to you, feels like a reward for a hard day’s work? Do you even need a reward? If the candy relaxes you, would a hot bath do the same? If it’s the extra energy hit you’re after, some sort of physical activity would do the same. And eventually, you’ll have the self-satisfaction of knowing you’re doing a good thing for your body and that will probably become reward enough.
I suppose it seems counterintuitive so say that one of the interesting aspects of intermittent fasting is that you will be thinking about eating a lot, at least initially. Though to be perfectly honest, almost three years into this lifestyle and I still think about eating a lot throughout my day. Granted, I am often creating new recipes and writing them up for this website, but even aside from that, I am often planning my next meal. Because with intermittent fasting you are eating fewer times throughout the day, it is important to make sure you’re getting all the nourishment you need. Eating a paleo type diet makes it pretty easy because the foods that fit that diet framework are generally very nutrient dense. But if you’re not following a paleo type diet, then it will be easier to fill up on less nutritious foods during your short eating window.
Intermittent fasting doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t think about food. It does mean you will save all the time involved in preparing, eating and cleaning up after a meal. Fasting might take up more mental space in your day, at least initially, but it will take up less physical time.
This post is already super duper long, but this is a topic I feel very passionately about because it has brought me to a level of health I had not experienced before, no matter what I tried. And it’s really so easy. I didn’t add in new expensive supplements, I didn’t have to cook an extra meal, I didn’t have to add a new activity, it didn’t require more doctor’s appointments. No, I added nothing. There is no cost. It’s really one of those things where I would say you have nothing to lose if you decide to give it a try.
What questions do you have? What fasting stories do you have to share? Leave them in the comments below.
Happy fasting!